STIMULATING SENTENCE PRODUCTION IN AGRAMMATIC PATIENTS - THE EFFECT OF THE VISUAL CUE PROGRAM ON SPONTANEOUS SPEECH

The Visual Cue Programme (VCP), a sentence-production programme, is pr esented and the effect on spontaneous speech in two chronic Broca's ap hasia patients is reported. In an A-B-A-B design the effect was measur ed by the Aachen Aphasia Test, a sentence-processing test battery, and the linguistic analysis of spontaneous speech. The overall aphasia as sessment shows no improvement; the sentence-processing test battery an d the spontaneous speech analysis show different patterns in the two p atients. One moderately impaired Broca patient shows improved producti on of verbs in isolation, associated with a more complete realization of verbs plus argument structures in spontaneous speech. The other pat ient, who has a severe Broca's aphasia, is characterized by better pro duction of sentences and morphosyntactic elements in constrained produ ction tasks, and absence of generalization of this morphosyntactic abi lity to spontaneous speech.